Reminiscing on Jurassic Park... (Patreon)

If you've seen Tetrapod Zoology recently, you'll know that I've been writing about Jurassic Park (what with it being the 25th anniversary of the film's release). Here's the entire Jurassic Park text, the latter two-thirds of which have not yet been released at Tet Zoo, with some of the planned illustrations...

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 Twenty-Five Years After Jurassic Park, Part 1

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past several days you’ll know that June 2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the Universal Studios movie Jurassic Park, one of recent history’s most influential, popular and successful of movies. Jurassic Park did more than any other dinosaur-themed movie before or since. It brought to the public the svelte, hot-blooded, dynamic, sophisticated and perhaps behaviourally complex animals of the Dinosaur Renaissance, its main characters said (fairly accurate) things about the dinosaurian origin of birds, and it celebrated dinosaurs as awesome animals that would bowl us over with their size, majesty, power and spectacle were we to see them alive. And it did all of this with effects that were – at the time – among the best to be brought to the big screen.

Caption:  I’m not sure whether Jurassic Park is a good book, but it might be your duty to read it if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I don’t own any of the early editions; this is the 1991 Arrow edition. Credit: Darren Naish 

I was a college student in my late teens in 1993 (studying for qualifications we term ‘A’ levels here in the UK), but even then I was both a fully-fledged, card-carrying dinosaur-nerd and fairly committed to an academic career that would – ultimately – lead me to being qualified in vertebrate palaeontology. I am not, therefore, among those palaeontologists who felt especially inspired or moved to action by the movie; I was already travelling down that path, Jurassic Park or not. For me, the success and popularity of Jurassic Park – initially Michael Crichton’s 1991 novel and latterly Spielberg’s movie – was, rather, a case of seeing people jump on the dinosaur bandwagon after we cool kids were already wallowing in the awesome. But this was ok. 

Caption:  During the early 1990s – before seeing Jurassic Park – I was drawing stuff like this. Some of you will recognise transparent re-drawings of pieces by Greg Paul (with a Mark Hallett ankylosaur in there as well). Jurassic Park or no, I was heading in a given direction. Credit: Darren Naish 

On that note, virtually everyone involved in scientific dinosaur research today has their own Jurassic Park story, and virtually everyone has something interesting to say about the movie and what it means to them. If you feel as if you’ve heard more than enough starry-eyed lovefesting already, now is the time to turn away. But if you want to hear my take on the movie... well, here we go. 

Caption:  I’m not allowed to publish an image of the relevant image of National Geographic itself, so here’s a version I made myself. It features a shrink-wrapped rendition of the hadrosaur Saurolophus by John Gurche. Credit: Darren Naish 

Even during the early months of 1993, I – like many people seriously interested in dinosaurs – already knew quite a lot about Jurassic Park the movie. I’d read Crichton’s book (Crichton 1991) two or three times prior to the summer of 1993, and I was familiar with the look of the dinosaurs that were going to feature in the film (my English language teacher Mr Shaun O’Toole was kind enough to pass me some Jurassic Park-themed educational material sent to colleges, and it used Crash McCreery’s concept art). A really fun article in January 1993’s National Geographic finished with a brief, tantalising section on the in-development movie and included a mouth-watering image of the T. rex robot, under construction, in Stan Winston’s workshop. It was also known that Jack Horner would be the main scientific adviser, which is fair enough given that Crichton made it very clear that the Alan Grant of the book was based on Horner. Grant of the book, in fact, basically is Horner. At least some storyboards for Jurassic Park the movie even show Grant as a Horner-lookalike.

Caption:  Hey look: a version of that evangelical-sounding phrase has already been used for a book about the Dinosaur Renaissance (Lauber 1989). And that’s a Greg Paul dinosaur on the cover... are you noticing a theme here? Credit: Darren Naish 

But I had mixed feelings about the film we were going to see, as weird as that might seem. It was great that people at large were finally going to Hear The Good News About Dinosaurs (my teenage dinosaur fandom did have something of an evangelical zeal), but I had this nagging doubt that things might not turn out well. Crichton’s book includes a bunch of weird stuff that’s objectionable to those who know dinosaurs. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: no, neither Crichton nor Spielberg super-sized Velociraptor (which was, as I’m sure you’ve heard, turkey-sized in real life, albeit with a much longer tail than a turkey). Rather, Crichton followed an unpopular, minority proposal published by Greg Paul in his 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World: this being that the Late Cretaceous, east Asian dromaeosaur Velociraptor was similar enough to the substantially larger, geologically older dromaeosaur Deinonychus from the USA to be classified with it in the same genus. And Velociraptor wins out, since the name was published in 1924, versus 1969 for Deinonychus. So, the Velociraptor of Jurassic Park is actually a slightly enlarged Deinonychus, not a super-sized Velociraptor. If you already knew the argument put forward by Paul (1988), the Jurassic Park use of the word Velociraptor was not much of a big deal. Incidentally, neither Paul nor anyone else endorses this view today. Deinonychus is not a species of Velociraptor, nor are the two all that closely related.

Caption: In real life, Velociraptor was about 2.5 m long and weighed around 25 kg (it would have been a bit longer in life due to long feathers on its tail). This mounted skeleton (at the IRSNB, Brussels) is poised in front of the foot of a Tyrannosaurus, perhaps helping with scale. Incidentally, if you’re curious about the validity of the comparison with a “large turkey” used above, exceptionally big wild-living turkeys can reach 20 kg, and the world-record captive bird was 39 kg. Credit: Darren Naish 

What else was weird about Crichton’s Jurassic Park? The T. rex has a giant, flexible, extendible tongue that smells of urine, the juvenile tyrannosaur romps like a puppy (yeah, when I look at baby birds and other archosaurs I definitely think “it romps like a puppy”), the dromaeosaurs have hyena-like bite strength and are capable of chewing through metal, Triceratops has poor eyesight (why would a dinosaur have poor eyesight? It’s not a mammal), a whole bunch of the dinosaurs have toxic saliva, and there’s a weird streak of anti-science rhetoric throughout. To give one example, Ian Malcom says at one point that palaeontologists deliberately want to turn the natural environment into a degraded wasteland during their digs because --- that’s how we like our science! Disclaimer: I have, indeed, met palaeontologists who don’t give a crap about the environment or its preservation (two of them, to be precise). But they’re very much in the minority.

Caption: The ‘raptors’ of Jurassic Park have an unmistakable look that’s not much like the real appearance of these animals as we currently understand it (my feathered version at right is now looking dated since I made many of the feathers too short; a revised version is in preparation). It’s probably mostly for this reason that the sequels – all the way up to 2018 – have retained this conservative, innaccurate look. Credit: Darren Naish 

And then… feathers. It was obvious that the movie’s dromaeosaurs were going to be unfeathered. They’re described that way in the book, and consensus opinion among experts of the time was that feathers were a no-no. I knew (‘knew’) that this was wrong, and that Greg Paul was right about the likely presence of Archaeopteryx-like feathering on dromaeosaurs and other bird-like predatory dinosaurs (Paul 1987, 1988). I’m being ironic here; I was convinced by Paul’s logic about the featheriness of non-bird dinosaurs, but confirmation of this proposal (that dromaeosaurs are kin are so similar, skeletally, to Archaeopteryx that – like Archaeopteryx – they were surely feathered too) was not yet on the table. 

Caption: Actual material fossil evidence confirming the presence of feathers (or feather homologues) in non-bird dinosaurs didn’t turn up until 1996 when this dinosaur – this is a referred specimen of the compsognathid Sinosauropteryx prima – was described from Liaoning Province in China. However, I’m one of those dinosaur specialists who would have put feathers on the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park had I been in charge. Credit: Darren Naish 

On that note, it’s popular these days to say that the palaeontologists of the early 1990s didn’t know that dromaeosaurs and their kin were feathered, and that making them scaly-skinned was thus the ‘right’ thing for the makers of Jurassic Park to do. Here I’m in a bit of a quandary. The material evidence demonstrating a full-on feathery covering for these animals was, indeed, absent at the time, and an argument could be made that going with a scaly skin was appropriately conservative and thus ‘more scientific’. But – on the other hand – the logic behind Paul’s argument that these animals likely were feathered was pretty good, was in accord with the rest of our understanding about theropod evolution and bird origins, and – while not mainstream – was considered at least worthy of consideration by palaeontologists who knew what they were talking about. Look at enough dinosaur literature of the 1980s and 90s and you’ll see lots of nods to the idea that feathers were not exclusive to birds. Indeed, another dinosaur film of 1993 – Adam Simon’s Carnosaur – features (very briefly) a feathered dromaeosaur... though Carnosaur did, admittedly, have somewhat lower production values than those of Jurassic Park, to put it mildly.

Caption:  The prophecy of the 1980s and early 90s has been fulfilled: today, we know of tens of species of feathery non-bird dinosaurs. This is crow-sized Serikornis from the Upper Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation (Serikornis and its relatives might be closer to birds than are animals like Velociraptor, but we also have fully feathered fossils that are indisputable close relatives of Velociraptor). Credit: Darren Naish 

Ok, there are all kinds of arguments as goes why they didn’t feather the Jurassic Park dromaeosaurs. Feathers are a pain in the ass to render, especially so given the infant state of CG in the early 1990s, so leaving them out was definitely a wise move effects- and budget-wise. Then there’s the fact that Horner and the other advisers for the movie wouldn’t want to be seen as crazy radicals leaping ahead of scientific evidence. And then there’s Spielberg’s take: that feathering the dinosaurs would make them non-scary. This argument is nonsense of course, since an accurately feathered dromaeosaur looks about as non-scary as an eagle, but it does have some validity given that many renditions of feathered non-bird dinosaurs have been laughably bad if not comical. It takes a special artist and (in cases where the artists aren’t experts themselves) a special adviser to get feathery dromaeosaurs looking right.

Caption: A highly accurate re-enactment of a scene from Jurassic Park. We’ll be seeing lots more of this sort of thing in the next article. Credit: Darren Naish 

Nevertheless, concerned that Mr Spielberg was indeed going to deny the world the big-budget feathery dromaeosaur outing it deserved I… wrote to him. A futile gesture, and one that did not elicit response, duh. I also wrote to my local newspaper who – I think – published my letter. And I had a protest t-shirt made, the plan being to wear it to the premiere and score valuable points. Inspired by words used in Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World and a season 3 episode of Red Dwarf, it read ‘Scaly Protobirds No Thanks! Feathering the Theropods: A Matter of Principle’. Ha, take that, bourgeoisie! Sure enough, when I wore this t-shirt out on the night of the premiere, I was greeted with smiles, high-fives, and was hoisted aloft to cheers and laughter; I also got hit on quite a lot (I mean sexually). Or something like that.

Caption: I had, like, the best idea for a t-shirt. The initial draft version – featuring a hypothetical maniraptoran meant to be close to the ancestry of Dromaeosauridae – is at left, the final version at right. It was 1993, so I was (wrongly) giving my feathery non-bird theropods naked legs and hands, ‘wrist wings’ and short tail feathers: a totally ‘Paulian’ look. Credit: Darren Naish 

And so, at last, we come to the movie itself…. To be continued!

Refs - -

Crichton, M. 1991. Jurassic Park. Random House, London.

Paul, G. S. 1987. The science and art of restoring the life appearance of dinosaurs and their relatives - a rigorous how-to guide. In Czerkas, S. J. & Olson, E. C. (eds) Dinosaurs Past and Present Vol. II. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/University of Washington Press (Seattle and London), pp. 4-49.

Paul, G. S. 1988. Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. Simon & Schuster (New York), pp. 464.

Twenty-Five Years After Jurassic Park, Part 2

And so we come to the movie itself. Until recently, movies in the UK (yes, I’m sat in England while writing this) were released weeks to months after their release in North America. So, JP Day in the US might have been June 9th but we here in the UK didn’t get it until July 16th. The agony. 1993 was (effectively if not literally) pre-email and pre-internet for ordinary citizens, so there was none of the instant discussion, spoilers and chatter we associate with movie releases today. Just tons and tons of coverage in newspapers, magazines, news TV shows and so on. I absorbed all of it (I worked in a news-agents at the time, so got to see everything in newspapers and magazines before it went on sale), gleaning further clues to the film’s plot and visuals. Eventually, I’d watched enough TV spots and promotional things to know the dialogue for some of the scenes by heart, plus a few seconds of the T. rex paddock attack were already familiar viewing. As a consequence, I already knew about the seismic shock thing. What? They seriously have an elephant-sized animal making loud bangs every time one of its feet hits the ground? I get that this is fun and suspenseful film-making… but it’s kinda dumb. 

And I can’t say that I was a fan of the venom-spitting, neck-frilled dilophosaur either. Crichton’s dilophosaurs are venomous (ok, Crichton incorrectly says ‘poisonous’, the fool) but are otherwise proper, full-sized dilophosaurs (7 m or so long), so it was obvious that Spielberg and his people had sought to modify the creature for cinematic effect (the movie’s Dilophosaurus has to be small enough to fit into a car, small enough to look innocuous on first viewing, and be instantly distinguishable from the Velociraptors). Irksome but not soul-destroying, especially when you have to give credit to the idea that dinosaurs reconstructed from ancient DNA are either going to be new taxa or – as per the book and movie – are actually genetic hybrids, not pure dinosaurs

ANYWAY, the kindness of friends meant that I managed to get in on the evening of premiere night. And – WOAH – what a ride.  Jurassic Park provides the most intense emotional high with its singing, striding, rearing brachiosaur and Grant’s reaction, one of the most memorable scenes in cinema. The T. rex attack scene is just sheer awesome and packed full of thrills and outstanding detail. The Gallimimus stampede, the sick Triceratops, the kitchen scene, the final battle in the rotunda… oh, oh, the Velociraptor feeding scene with the unfortunate cow! I actually had the sounds from that scene as my answering-machine message for a few months back in 1993. If, so far, I’ve seemed curmudgeonly or somewhat unimpressed or cynical as goes Jurassic Park, rest assured that this belies a committed love of the film, of a real emotional connection to and enthusiasm for it. I had a genuine concern on seeing it for the first time that I might not be able to keep my heart rate at a normal level for the duration, make of that what you will. After seeing it once in the cinema I went to see it again. And then again. And again. And, err, again. And again. In fact, I distinctly recall there being a TV ad at the time which stated “If you’ve seen it once, you haven’t seen it all!” – the first time I recall advertisers telling you that it’s ok to see a film at the cinema more than once. And when it came out on video (we’re talking VHS tape, kids)… well, I don’t know how many times I’ve re-watched my favourite bits, the T. rex attack in particular. The number is high.

And Jurassic Park is not just a film made for dinosaur nerds. Speaking as someone who enjoys movie, and not as a scientist who specialises on dinosaurs and other animals of the Mesozoic, Jurassic Park is a great movie. It has a story that you can buy into it. It has awesome, atmospheric and emotional shots and scenes that hit their targets. And you mostly like, and root for, the characters. Goldblum’s Malcolm could have been obnoxious and horribly arrogant (he’s mostly portrayed this way in the book) but he’s likeable and honourable when it counts. Even Nedry – who’s some sort of embodiment of greed in the book – didn’t deserve to die, and Attenborough’s Hammond is also played well as warm, likeable, granddaddy character. Kids in movies are often dire and high on the list of characters who need to be eaten by dinosaurs but I really like Tim and Lex in the movie: again, a contrast to the book, where Lex at least is annoying. Grant is stoic, hard to read and flat – which sounds like criticism but is, I feel, exactly how he should have been portrayed. And Sattler turns out to be a bit of a bad-ass who does things that feel right for an actual, real-world scientist (I’m thinking of the poop-handling scene).

Naturally, repeat viewings lead to the realisation that Jurassic Park contains an extraordinary number of continuity errors and such. It’s fun to talk about those things (and I often have) but it does, on reflection, sound like whiny undue criticism of what was clearly an intense, gruelling amount of work produced by a bunch of very talented people. My thinking on the sorts of errors I have in mind is that they’re essentially ubiquitous across cinema and TV but only observable once you obsess on detail after the millionth viewing and… something tells me that films aren’t exactly meant to be watched that way. Ok: that blast of air from the tyrannosaur doesn’t really come from its nostrils, but from the left-hand corner of screen. Illusion shattered. But did I notice this when I first watched the film in the cinema, like a normal person? No, I saw it, bought it, and though it was frikkin’ awesome.

On the subject of visuals and the sheer look of the scenes, part of what made Jurassic Park such a phenomenon was the interest that everyone had in its effects. Features on such things as BBC’s 9 o’clock news (or was it ITV’s 10 o’clock news?) not only helped drum up hype but made Jurassic Park newsy: this isn’t Just Another Movie, but the dawning of a revolution in cinematic entertainment. I do remember there being similar mainstream interest in the effects of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and to a degree in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, two movies I also know embarrassingly well. And you’ll know that T2’s effects can certainly be considered linked to those of Jurassic Park.

The big question: how – but how!! – had Spielberg and his buddies given us such real, living, breathing dinosaurs? Even at the time it was obvious that the film was historic as goes effects and visuals. Those of us who’ve read and seen a million ‘making of’ magazine articles, TV spots and youtube videos (or have read Don Shay and Jody Duncan’s outstandingly good The Making of Jurassic Park) are familiar with the story of how Phil Tippett’s original stop-motion puppets were superseded but eventually made integral to the CG process, of how ILM broke new ground with their innovations in CG, and of the amazing job on the robotics and models made at Stan Winston’s studio (Shay & Duncan 1993). I might be known, rightly or not, as a zoology nerd, but I’ve spent some significant part of my life watching the films of the Stars Wars, Alien and Terminator franchises, in which case seeing creative forces the likes of ILM, Tippett and Stan Winston work together is basically a dream come true. Damn, did they deliver.

It’s not just the mechanics and craftmanship that makes Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs so good, it’s the fact that there was a real and obvious effort throughout the making of this film to – some artistic license besides (like those seismic T. rex footfalls… and that dilophosaur) – to make the dinosaurs about as accurate as they could be. Sure, there are things they either got wrong, or modified for cinematic effect (examples: Tyrannosaurus didn’t really have a triangular eye horn like that, the hands of a Triceratops wouldn’t look as elephantine as they do in the movie, the brachiosaur was super-sized for effect and should have had far slimmer limbs, and dromaeosaurs couldn’t curl their lips to create a nefarious facial expression) but – by and large – those behind the movie did work hard to give us ‘real’ dinosaurs. It’s almost as if they cared. Speaking as someone who cares about the way dinosaur life appearance is portrayed, the big win of Jurassic Park is that it gave naïve audiences the horizontal-bodied, bird-like dinosaurs of the Renaissance, not the tail-dragging, chubby behemoths of yore. If you were a kid at the time Jurassic Park came out, and hence have always felt familiar with horizontal-bodied, fairly accurate-looking dinosaurs, count yourself lucky.

So, not only do we have a movie that brings a view of dinosaurs as active, dynamic, warm-blooded, social animals to its audience, it also gives them dinosaurs that at least look pretty close to the genuine articles, the big disclaimer here being – yeah – the feather issue.

And it’s at this point that I need to stop talking about Jurassic Park and comment briefly on its various sequels, including of course the Jurassic World films. I’ll say that 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park has some good bits (among them the dinosaur capture scene) but otherwise has too much hokum to be likeable (the gymnastic scene, the ‘I’ve stepped in something’ scene, Burke’s death, the Godzilla comes to San Diego scene, basically everything on the ship…). Jurassic Park III is, ugh, just terrible. 

And Jurassic World? As I’ve said at length elsewhere, I’m basically disappointed with the people behind that movie for opting to stick with the safe ‘brand look’ of their dinosaurs and not go with the reboot they could have. Scaly-skinned dromaeosaurs might have been excusable for 1993, but a 2015 movie could have given us something better. Yes, of course movie-makers are perfectly entitled to create whatever fictional universe they like given that it’s only a movie (yaaawn), but I can’t help but be frustrated as someone who cares about public education and – boy – what a contrast to the approach behind Jurassic Park. I’m not just talking about the lack of feathers on the dromaeosaurs: pretty much all the Jurassic World animals are hideous caricatures; even the T. rex somehow looks less good that the version of 1993. And in contrast to Jurassic Park, I just don’t think that Jurassic World is a good movie. What about the new one (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom)? It should be clear from all I’ve said in these articles that I do actually enjoy movies and I watch them often. At the time of writing, Solo, my several viewings of Avengers: Infinity War and a nostalgic re-viewing of Inner Space from two evenings ago are all fresh in my mind. And, sad to say, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom just doesn’t interest me at all.

Will we ever see a dinosaur film that does anything like 1993’s Jurassic Park ever again? The theme of Jurassic Park, at least, has been carried through to other projects, arguably among them the Walking With franchise and the travelling (but presently London-based) interactive attraction Dinosaurs in the Wild. But a new movie that’s actually as good, exciting and ground-breaking as that of summer 1993? It could be done. But my hopes are not high.

Refs - -

Crichton, M. 1991. Jurassic Park. Random House, London.

Currie, P. J. 1991. The Flying Dinosaurs. Red Deer College Press, Red Deer, Alberta.

Paul, G. S. 1987. The science and art of restoring the life appearance of dinosaurs and their relatives - a rigorous how-to guide. In Czerkas, S. J. & Olson, E. C. (eds) Dinosaurs Past and Present Vol. II. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/University of Washington Press (Seattle and London), pp. 4-49.

Paul, G. S. 1988. Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. Simon & Schuster (New York), pp. 464.

Shay, D. & Duncan, J. 1993. The Making of Jurassic Park. Boxtree, London.